Oliver North???

You know there’s been this long-running dispute between, on the one hand, the US military command in Afghanistan and on the other, the Afghan government and the United Nations, over the number of civilians killed in a controversial US air attack near Azizabad, Afghanistan on August 22.
According to this story in today’s London Times it turns out the US military was relying to some degree in its repeated confirmation of its original (very low) casualty estimates on the say-so of– guess who– that infamous trickster Oliver North.
Hat-tip to Siun of Firedoglake.
I completely concur with the judgment Siun expressed there: “Pardon me while I throw up.”

For those too young to remember, North was the Marines colonel who was deeply involved in planning and implementing the Reagan administration’s infamous Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s. In May 1989 he was convicted of three charges in connection with Iran-Contra: accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents. Those convictions were later “vacated” on a technicality.
So today, in Afghanistan, he is still hard at work covering up governmental malfeasance, it seems.
The Times’s Tim Coghlan reports from Kabul that,

The Pentagon’s original investigation concluded last week that US forces used close air support after coming under heavy fire during a mission to seize a Taleban commander named Mullah Sadiq. They allege that he died in the operation.
The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.

From the comments below the Fox News vblog post from August 23 presented here, it is clear that one of them was from something described as “the Azizabad fight.” I could not view the video clips, not having Adobe Flash Player 9.
Commenter Bill, down near the bottom, wrote:

As someone who has been in Afghanistan and Iraq working as a combat cameraman for several major US television networks I must say this video does nothing to support the claims made by the US Military. Don’t get me wrong I am as pro military as one can be with regard to our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, offering this up as proof is ridiculous. It showed nothing and the second video was looped material. I think it is disingenuous to loop a short clip or two to try a make your material seem more complete and a bit obvious.

A very full, on-the-ground report on the aftermath of the August 22 air attacks was published in the NYT today. It was by Carlotta Gall, datelined Azizabad. Her account seemed in all important respects to corroborate the accounts of high casualties given by the Afghan government and the United Nations. (She also noted that there is considerable evidence that Mullah Sadiq wasn’t killed in the raid– indeed, he may not even have been in the village that night.)
Many survivors and even victims of the US air attack were Afghan government employees, or members of their families. Gall, like Coghlan, includes in the web edition of her story a link to a video taken August 23 by a doctor from a nearby town. It shows a large number of bodies on the floor of what seems to be a mosque. The bodies are wrapped in blankets, and the video shows someone walking round and uncovering the faces of many of the bodies, while in the background mourners wail.
Gall wrote,

For two weeks, the United States military has insisted that only 5 to 7 civilians, and 30 to 35 militants, were killed in what it says was a successful operation against the Taliban: a Special Operations ground mission backed up by American air support…
The accounts of the airstrike’s aftermath given by Afghans and Americans could not be further apart.
A visitor to the village and to three graveyards within its limits on Aug. 31 counted 42 freshly dug graves. Thirteen of the graves were so small they could hold only children; another 13 were marked with stones in the way that Afghans identify women’s graves.
Villagers questioned separately identified relatives in the graves; their names matched the accounts given by elders of the village of those who died in each of eight bomb-damaged houses and where they were buried. They were quite specific about who was killed in the airstrikes and did not count those who died for other reasons; one of the fresh graves, they said, belonged to a man who was killed when villagers demonstrated against the Afghan Army on Aug. 23.
At the battle scene, shell craters dotted the courtyards and shrapnel had gouged holes in the walls. Rooms had collapsed and mud bricks and torn clothing lay in uneven mounds where people had been digging. In two places blood was splattered on a ceiling and a wall. An old woman pushed forward with a cauldron full of jagged metal bomb fragments, and a youth presented cellphone video he said was shot on the day of the bombing; there was no time stamp.
The smell of bodies lingered in one compound, causing villagers to start digging with spades. They found the body of a baby, caked in dust, in the corner of a bombed-out room.
Cellphone images that a villager said that he shot, and seen by this reporter, showed two lines of about 20 bodies each laid out in the mosque, with the sounds of loud sobbing and villagers’ cries in the background.
An Afghan doctor who runs a clinic in a nearby village said he counted 50 to 60 bodies of civilians, most of them women and children and some of them his own patients, laid out in the village mosque on the day of the strike. The doctor, who works for a reputable nongovernmental organization here, at first gave his name but then asked that it be withheld because he feared retribution from Afghans feeding intelligence to the Americans.
The United States military, in a series of statements about the operation, has accused the villagers of spreading Taliban propaganda. Speaking on condition that their names not be used, some military officials have suggested that the villagers fabricated such evidence as grave sites — and, by implication, that other investigators had been duped. But many villagers have connections to the Afghan police, NATO or the Americans through reconstruction projects, and they say they oppose the Taliban.
The district chief of Shindand, Lal Muhammad Umarzai, 45, said he personally counted 76 bodies that day, and he believed that more bodies were unearthed over the next two days, bringing the total to more than 90. Mr. Umarzai has been praised for bringing security to the district in the three months since his appointment and is on good terms with American and NATO forces in the region…

Gall adds that yesterday, the US military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, finally asked US Centcom to send out a general to review the earlier American military investigation in light of “emerging evidence.” McKiernan added that, “The people of Afghanistan have our commitment to get to the truth.”
A commitment that’s about two weeks too late, I would say.
And prior to that, they were relying on Oliver North???
this latest air attack– like the ones the US military has been launching against targets in Pakistan– has almost certainly deepened the distrust between Washington and what was once a strongly pro-US government.
Human Rights Watch has a new report out today about the casualties from the US air attacks in Afghanistan. In an accompanying news release it says,

Civilian deaths in Afghanistan from US and NATO airstrikes nearly tripled from 2006 to 2007, with recent deadly airstrikes exacerbating the problem and fuelling a public backlash, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. The report also condemns the Taliban’s use of “human shields” in violation of the laws of war…

Update, Mopn. 4 p.m.: This is Ollie’s own written account of the fight.